How to paint happy little trees or turn happy little pages
In 2011, the writer and performance artist Madhu Kaza visited strangers around New York City to read them to sleep during their bedtimes. The project, called Here Is Where We Meet, titled after John Berger’s… Read more »
Revelations from Proust’s questionnaire
In the mid-nineteenth century, filling out confession albums was a popular pastime in English households and French salons. In 1886, at age 14, Marcel Proust filled out answers to an… Read more »
Censoring nosebleeds in a post-Fukushima manga
Oishinbo (“The Gourmet”), a manga about a journalist and his partner touring Japan gathering ingredients for the ultimate meal, was suspended last month for depicting its characters in the latest chapter… Read more »
Illustrating the dystopian trippiness of Akira
BFI Film Classics is a series of criticism published by the British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan to “introduce, interpret, and celebrate landmark films of world cinema.” Nine new books are due out in October to… Read more »
Hail & Farewell: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
There is a bookstore in Cartagena, Colombia, called Ábaco Libros y Café. Along a wall lined with wine near the entrance is a collage of black-and-white photographs of all the writers who’ve… Read more »
Peter and Jane and Miriam and Penguin take on art, copyright, crucifixes, and dead rabbits
Peter and Jane are brother and sister. Miriam and Ezra are sister and brother. Peter and Jane’s mother loves art. Miriam and Ezra make art. Peter and Jane learn about… Read more »
Coming home to the red lanterns of Zhang Yimou and Gong Li: A conversation with Teju Cole
Yan Geling’s The Criminal Lu Yanshi, a novel about an intellectual in exile who gets sent to a labor camp upon his return home, was published in 2011. Though it… Read more »
Tarkovsky’s Forever Fond Farewell
In 2012, while browsing through Eslite, Taipei’s twenty-four-hour bookstore, I found a book that would help me understand how to sit through an Andrei Tarkovsky film. It is called Bright, Bright… Read more »
Tibetan literature: a library in exile
A treasure trove of Tibetan literature has left its temporary home in New York for Asia. Instead of ending up in Lhasa, however, the collection of original wood blocks and… Read more »
“Elementarno, my dear Watson”
Supplementing my fascination with the canine, hotel, and bobsledding shenanigans in Sochi and of Pussy Riot’s Brooklyn appearance, I’ve been dipping into two Russian Sherlock Holmes small-screen adaptations, as well as… Read more »